Terrorism was the determining issue in the 2004 presidential election said Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor of The New Yorker, in a post-election analysis Tuesday in the ICC Auditorium.
The first in a series of The New Yorker College Tour events to hit campus this week, Tuesday’s dialogue between Hertzberg and New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden focused on the Democrats’ strategy to regain the White House and the issues that affected the presidential campaigns.
“I’m still in mourning about the result,” Hertzberg said. “I felt more emotionally involved with this election than at any other time in my life.”
Hertzberg said the race showed that many Americans were not confident with the president’s leadership.
“But 48 percent is not nothing. This was not a landslide,” he said. “This was a wartime election and Bush had all the advantages of an incumbency.”
Hertzberg maintained that Kerry sided with the American people on the majority of the issues, including taxes, the economy, the environment and the war in Iraq, but that the senator could not gain enough ground when it came to terrorism.
“[Americans] would rather have a bad war [on terror] than no war, and they were not so sure Kerry would fight the war for them,” he said. “Kerry said he defended this country as a young man and would do it again, but that was not enough.”
The Bush administration’s clear victory in this election, Hertzberg worried, will send a negative image of America around the world.
“Most of the world wanted a change in the American government. I do fear a big growth in anti-Americanism, because now it looks like [Bush] really is the choice of the American public,” he said.
Hertzberg also addressed some of the negative campaigning that went on during the election, including the “flip-flop” label Kerry inherited.
“It’s a standard method of political attack on senators running for president. You have years of votes, some made in procedural contexts,” he said. “If you pluck something out, it’s like scripture – the devil can quote scripture. The devil can quote the congressional record too.”
The advertisements from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which challenged the senator’s wartime conduct, dealt a blow to Kerry as well, Hertzberg continued.
“If you’re a true war hero, you don’t respond to the attacks. You don’t dignify them, which is completely understandable,” he said. “But it seemed as if Kerry wasn’t defending himself.”
With the election now complete, Democrats have a chance to regroup, Hertzberg said.
“All the levers of power are in Republican hands,” he said. “The Democrats should be an opposition party now. They should take this opportunity to draw together.”
A number of smaller issues also made their presence known on the campaign trail, including moral issues like gay marriage and abortion.
“In an election this close, there are all sorts of things you can point to,” Hertzberg said. “But gay [marriage] did become an issue. It was caused by liberal judicial over-reaching.”
He said that the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision to allow gay marriage went too far for many Americans.
“Homosexuality was slowly being accepted, the civil unions in Vermont, for example,” Hertzberg said. “But there was a big psychological effect with the word `marriage.'”
Wickenden’s asked Hertzberg what it was like to work closely in a presidential campaign with Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian.
“He was a Christian in a way that didn’t shut me out,” Hertzberg responded. “His Christian ethics affected his policy in a different way – in charity, pity for the poor.”
He went on to question Christianity’s effect on Bush’s policy.
“I don’t understand the Christianity of Bush,” he said. “Is it just about making abortion illegal and making gays feel unwelcome in society?”
Hertzberg also addressed some of the vulnerabilities the Republicans may have in the next four years, pointing out the costs of the Republicans’ proposed social security reforms and elimination of the income tax.
“They’re in danger of over-reaching,” he said. “Over the long run it will destroy or damage the Republican Party.”
A reversal of Roe v. Wade could also turn the tide against the traditionally anti-abortion rights GOP.
“If the Republicans succeed in reversing Roe v. Wade, it will not be that big of a catastrophe itself – there will still be most of the country where you can get an abortion. But it will change the political dynamic in favor of the pro-choicers,” he said.
Herzberg also looked ahead to the 2008 election.
“Kerry might deserve another chance,” he said.
He stated that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) would be “too polarizing” for America. But he was optimistic about the newly elected Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D).
“Obama in 2012. Who knows? Maybe Obama in ’08,” he said.